Germany expects British drugmaker AstraZeneca Plc to deliver three million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine in February despite the company’s latest production problems, Health Minister Jens Spahn told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

AstraZeneca informed European Union officials on Friday it would cut deliveries of its Covid-19 vaccine to the bloc by 60 per cent to 31 million doses in the first quarter of the year due to production problems, a senior official told Reuters.

The decrease deals another blow to Europe’s Covid-19 vaccination drive after Pfizer Inc and German partner BioNTech slowed supplies of their vaccine to the bloc this week, saying the move was needed because of work to ramp up production.

“The good news is that if the AstraZeneca vaccine is approved at the end of January, we expect at least 3 million vaccine doses for Germany in February,” Spahn told Bild am Sonntag in an interview.